George F. Kennan at Age 100

While most Americans were celebrating Presidents' Day yesterday, a very different
holiday was being honored in Princeton, N.J. George F. Kennan, who formulated
the policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union during the early
cold war, turned 100. Surrounded by his wife and four children the frail Mr.
Kennan  diplomat, historian and sometimes Cassandra  had reached
a birthday he never imagined.

"The last thing he ever expected was to live so long," said his
biographer, John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history and political science
at Yale. "As a young man he was often sick. During his freshman year
at Princeton he had scarlet fever and was forced to drop out. He never felt
himself to be healthy. Ulcers were a constant problem."

Though pleased at Mr. Kennan's longevity, Mr. Gaddis also finds himself stymied.
In 1982 he agreed not to publish his biography of Mr. Kennan while the diplomat
was alive.

Mr. Gaddis first met Mr. Kennan in 1974 at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, when Mr. Gaddis, teaching at Ohio University, was considered a
rising star in the field of the history of American diplomacy, having already
published "The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947."

Mr. Kennan had joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton after
quitting the diplomatic service in 1953. In 1977 Mr. Gaddis interviewed him
for an essay for Foreign Affairs, on the 30th anniversary of Mr. Kennan's
famous "Sources of Soviet Conduct" analysis, known in countless
history books as the Mr. X article, since Mr. Kennan remained anonymous at
the time.

But their relationship jelled in 1982 when Mr. Gaddis published "Strategies
of Containment," judging Mr. Kennan to be the pivotal foreign policy
analyst in post-1945 America. "He wrote me a couple of generous letters
about that book," Mr. Gaddis recalled. "He basically said that I
properly understood his strategic thinking."

Mr. Gaddis asked Mr. Kennan if anybody was writing his biography; the response
was self-deprecating: "No. It never occurred to me that anyone would
want to."

An admirer of Ronald Steel's biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American
Century" (1980), Mr. Gaddis struck a deal with Mr. Kennan modeled on
the one Mr. Steel had arranged with Lippmann: he would be his authorized biographer,
have access to all of his papers, but publish his book only after his subject
had died.

"The agreement was made in 1982," Mr. Gaddis recalled. "He
was 78 years old. Neither of us envisioned he would be around in 2004. In
fact I was thinking the other day about Boswell's relationship with Samuel
Johnson, which went on for 20 years. It's hard to believe, but this one has
gone on longer."

Mr. Gaddis is not complaining. His friendship with Mr. Kennan has deepened,
and his subject's historical prominence continues to rise. Besides regular
access to Mr. Kennan, Mr. Gaddis has had the rare privilege of reading all
of his unpublished diaries, which he says are "classic American literature,"
an eloquent successor to John Quincy Adams's voluminous effort a century earlier.